France’s Top General Resigns in Dispute Over Military Spending

PARIS — A public fight between President Emmanuel Macron and France’s chief military officer over proposed cuts in military spending led Wednesday to the first high-profile resignation of a public servant since Mr. Macron was elected in May.

In an unusual move, the military chief, Gen. Pierre de Villiers, offered his resignation after Mr. Macron said publicly that he would be the one to determine military policy and implicitly criticized General de Villiers for questioning the government’s proposed budget cuts.

The president’s seemingly unshakable confidence in his judgment, and his reluctance to brook any dissent, could signal potential difficulties ahead as Mr. Macron tries to shrink government spending.

The dispute with General de Villiers was raised in Mr. Macron’s annual speech to the armed forces on July 13, the day before France’s imposing Bastille Day military parade.

In that speech, the president referred to concerns the general had raised in a closed parliamentary hearing about the cuts. The general’s remarks were later leaked to the news media.

“I do not consider it honorable to put certain debates on public display,” Mr. Macron had said.

“I am your chief. The commitments that I have made to our citizens, to the army, I stick to them,” he said, adding that he did not need any “pressure” or “commentary.”

Mr. Macron has committed his government to meeting the European Union requirement that member governments keep their budget deficits to less than 3 percent of gross domestic product.

The blunt language used in his speech last week suggested the president was angry at having his policy questioned, and he hammered that point home in an interview three days later in the weekly newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche, saying that if there was a disagreement, the army chief would have to go.

“If something puts the chief of the armed forces at odds with the president of the republic, the chief of the armed forces changes,” Mr. Macron said in the interview.

In his resignation letter submitted to Mr. Macron on Wednesday, General de Villiers, a career military man, noted his loyalty to the French nation and its political authority, but added, “I viewed it as my responsibility to let them know my reservations, on several occasions, behind closed doors in all transparency and truth.”

Now, however, with the spending cuts being proposed, he said he could not guarantee “the protection of France and of the French today and tomorrow.”

The military is being asked to shoulder about 20 percent of the total anticipated cuts to the French budget this year, which would mean a reduction of 850 million euros, about $979 million, in military spending.

While that is a relatively small part of the military’s budget of €32 billion, it comes after several years of increasing demands on the armed forces, especially in the fight against terrorism.

It also appeared at odds with Mr. Macron’s commitment to increase military spending to 2 percent of G.D.P. — the amount that NATO countries are required to spend on defense — by 2025.

Mr. Macron has said that this year’s proposed cuts are temporary and that he plans to increase spending in 2018. Currently, France spends about 1.78 percent of its G.D.P. on the military.

After General de Villiers’s resignation, Mr. Macron endeavored to reassure ministers during a cabinet meeting that the proposed level of spending would be sufficient “to protect the country,” according to a spokesman.

Vincent Desportes, a retired general and former director of France’s École de Guerre Économique, or School of Economic Warfare, writing in the newspaper Le Monde, said that the head of state of the civilian government had not taken stock of how much the role of the military had changed.

“During the Cold War, the central role played by nuclear deterrence and the limited number of external operations had made defense into an essentially political exercise and reduced the role of the military in the nation,” Mr. Desportes wrote.

Now, however, the “professionalization, the multiplication of external operations, the real war and its procession of dead and wounded” have changed the situation, and he added that the government “has not wanted to recognize” it.

Mr. Macron replaced General de Villiers with another career officer, Gen. François Lecointre, who has served in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda.

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A10 of the New York edition with the headline: France’s Top General Quits in Dispute Over Cuts. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe